Umwelt

Description

Tim Elmo Feiten:

"Jakob von Uexküll (1864-1944) believed that every living creature inhabits a world of its own. The structure of this world is largely determined by the species to which a creature belongs, by its physiology, its behaviour, and its environment, but this world discloses itself only through individual subjective experience. As such, these worlds are both private and unique to each living subject. Uexküll coined the technical term Umwelt to refer to these worlds of subjective experience. Uexküll’s thought, and the concept of Umwelt at its centre, were received with excitement by his contemporaries and have exerted a small but steady influence on both science and philosophy ever since. However, his notion of Umwelt also has deeply unsettling consequences for the way we understand the world and our place in it.

Uexküll’s thought is a three-fold provocation:

1) He posits a world of experience for each living creature that is strictly beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, offending the boundless optimism in science engendered by centuries of technological successes and cultural dominance;

2) None of these Umwelten has a different metaphysical status than the others. Since we humans, including human scientists, are also living creatures, the world we each experience and study gives us no privileged access to an objective truth about a mind-independent world;

3) The claim that each human individual experiences a private phenomenal world of its own, and can never access the Umwelt of anyone else, has deeply disturbed many thinkers."

(https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/jakob-von-uexkull-umwelt)